{"id":1318,"date":"2016-02-25T20:55:36","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T01:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=1318"},"modified":"2018-08-11T16:48:33","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T20:48:33","slug":"legal-drama-a-view-from-the-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2016\/02\/25\/legal-drama-a-view-from-the-bridge\/","title":{"rendered":"John Owen Havard | Legal Drama: A View from the Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Owen Havard<\/strong><\/p>\n

A View from the Bridge<\/a> <\/em>(1955) by Arthur Miller, recently treated to an elemental restaging by director Ivo van Hove, features a narrator\u2014whose role resembles that of a Greek chorus\u2014drawn from the Italian enclave of Brooklyn in which the play takes place. The importance of this figure with respect to the unfolding drama of unspeakable desires and their tragic consequences acquires added heft from his profession: he is a lawyer. If Greek tragedy disclosed the core truth of an experience, whereby an individual grappled (not least through the consequences of their actions) with the \u201ctruth\u201d of \u201cwho they are,\u201d the law supplies an added layer to this process of revelation and reckoning. Legal questions have an obvious bearing on the guilt-ridden worlds of tragic drama. When sentenced to murder, an individual becomes \u201cguilty\u201d (not least in newspaper reporting), as what they did becomes, in the penal system, what they are. But what do these different orders of truth, and the discourses and practices by which they operate, have to do with one another? In his 1981 lectures at Louvain, published as Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling<\/a><\/em>, Foucault would take up these questions as they intersect with that of \u201cavowal,\u201d in which \u201che who speaks obligates himself to being what he says he is\u201d (WT<\/em> 16). Locating these lectures within Foucault\u2019s writings creates dramatic ripple effects that profoundly unsettle prevailing assumptions about the developing priorities of his thinking\u2014not least in revealing the convergence between disparate modes of truth-telling. In the conclusion of this post, I will return to Miller\u2019s play, in which sexuality, criminality, and truths of various kinds spectacularly collide. First, I will show how attention to these lectures reveals similarly striking connections that Foucault instilled with a sense of drama all his own.<\/p>\n

Opening Avowal<\/h1>\n

Foucault had recently situated criminality and sexuality in separate cellblocks, as it were, if also neighboring ones. Introducing the concerns of Subjectivit\u00e9 et v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/a>,<\/em> his 1980\u201381 lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, Foucault differentiated sexuality from the terrain investigated in his previous studies. In contrast with madness, pathology, or crime, truthful discourse (\u201cdiscours vrai\u201d) operated in an altogether different fashion here (in ways that look ahead, as Bernard Harcourt<\/a> has noted, to the practices of the self\u2014and \u201carts of living\u201d\u2014that would dominate his final lecture courses). Although sexuality, too, would become institutionalized, this would entail an altogether different relationship with the self and depend on discourses as distinct as the DSM-5 and a private diary. Madness, crime, sexuality, and illness were hardly, of course, distinct categories. Foucault recognized as much, employing these labels heuristically and remaining attuned both to their porous boundaries as well as the ways they became conflated within mutually-reinforcing regimes of power [1]. We might nonetheless suggest that Foucault overstated the case here and speculate that he himself recognized as much, taking as our evidence the importance his lectures at Louvain a few months later would place upon precisely the term by which he made this emphatic distinction. Foucault built upon this observation that the truth of sexuality would be institutionalized in a completely different fashion in noting that \u201cdiscours vrai\u201d was here organized around \u201cla pratique de l\u2019aveu<\/em>.\u201d Foucault\u2019s lectures at Louvain in April would emerge at the interstices of this earlier analysis, as though in the cracks between the distinctions he laid down in these recent lectures. Far from the truth of criminality taking shape solely within institutionalized procedures, under the coercive direction of outside professionals, Foucault\u2019s invitation to speak at Louvain by the School of Criminology would bring him to the realization that avowal of the true self\u2014no less than with sexuality\u2014remained crucial to the practice of penality.<\/p>\n

Making Drama<\/h1>\n

Foucault turned once again to Greek drama as a means of teasing apart differing orders of truth. In On the Government of the Living<\/a><\/em>, his 1979\u201380 lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, he had drawn upon what he termed the \u201cmechanism\u201d of Oedipus Rex<\/em> to delineate coinciding processes of \u201calethurgy<\/a>\u201d (the \u201cset of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true\u201d GL<\/em> 7). That play united a \u201cdivine half, religious, prophetic, ritual alethurgy, with an oracular, divinatory half \u2026 and then a human half, the individual alethurgy of memory and inquiry, with a murder half\u201d; the \u201ctotality of the truth\u201d was thus \u201cif not completely said, at least grasped fully \u2026 when they recall their memories\u201d (GL<\/em> 30\u20131). Alethurgy not only encompassed prophecies and oracles here, but the testimony of those servants that observed Oedipus\u2019s crime. These servants, or slaves, who \u201cfound themselves, as if by chance, on the scene of the truth\u201d were \u201cin the truth and not inhabited by it. It was they who inhabited the truth, or who, at least, frequented a reality, facts, actions, and characters on which they can deliver, in the name of their identity, in the name of the fact that they are themselves and are still the same, under their conditions, a true discourse\u201d (GL<\/em> 38). This truth required reinforcement; indeed, the play needed the possible \u201cfalsehood\u201d of the slaves \u201cfor the telling of the gods to become true\u201d while also needing \u201cthe truth-telling of the slaves for the uncertain truth-telling of the gods to become an inevitable certainty for men\u201d (GL<\/em> 42).<\/p>\n

In the Louvain lectures, the slaves in Oedipus Rex<\/em> become conduits for \u201ctruthful speech [une parole de v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em>]\u201d: \u201ca speech that is entirely true because the one who speaks may say: \u2018Yes, I did that. Yes, I am the one, autos<\/em>. I saw it. I heard it. I gave it. I did it.\u2019 And with this word, despite the fact that it emanates from the mouth of a slave who is threatened with execution, Oedipus\u2019s truth will appear. The chorus recognizes and accepts this truth. It alone ensures justice\u201d (WT<\/em>, 79). With the unfolding of the drama, diverse truths thus become braided together. While there was \u201cindividual anagn<\/em>\u014d<\/em>risis<\/em>,\u201d Oedipus\u2019s tragic recognition, corresponding to \u201cthe emergence of truth in the subject,\u201d there was also, Foucault notes, \u201cthe axis of establishing the truth not in the eyes of Oedipus but in the eyes of the chorus, a character that I believe to be absolutely central, as it is in all Greek plays. For if indeed Oedipus is searching for the truth, he is doing so precisely so that the chorus can recognize it\u2014the chorus, that is, the citizens, the people in assembly, or what is constituted as the judicial body with the responsibility for discovering, establishing, and validating the truth.\u201d This was the \u201caxis\u201d of the \u201cestablishment of truth in valid and legitimate juridical terms: (WT<\/em> 63).<\/p>\n

Christianity introduced drama of its own. In tandem with the shift in institutional context, Christian practice collapsed various kinds of truth, turning these processes inwards. Not only did Christianity impose upon the individual \u201can obligation to search for the truth of oneself\u201d however; there was an added obligation \u201cnot only to discover the truth, but to manifest<\/em> it\u201d (WT<\/em> 92, emphasis added). Describing the resulting acts of penitence and renunciation, Foucault noted that, in contrast with the ancients, there was \u201csomething \u2026 if you will, very theatrical, but in which what is shown, what must be shown, is the truth of the subject himself. What he truly is\u201d (WT<\/em> 116). This resulted in a practically obsessive, or at the least obligatory and obediently made repetition: \u201ca sort of vertical relationship through which one examined [surveille<\/em>] oneself and constantly examined one\u2019s own thought\u201d (WT<\/em> 148). The question thence became \u201chow to join together, into one unique subject, the subject of spiritual veridiction as it was constituted through these monastic techniques and the subject of law which, for that matter, was implicated by the institutions\u201d (WT 152).<\/p>\n

\u201cTo show her what he is!\u201d<\/h1>\n

We come here to the core question around which Foucault\u2019s lectures hinge: why would avowal remain so important, even when the law had already made a determination of guilt? Foucault acknowledged the performative function of legal practice\u2014whereby deeming an individual \u201ccondemned\u201d makes them so\u2014but drew a distinction with aveu<\/em>, or confession, from the condemned themselves:<\/p>\n

when the accused declares his guilt, it is more than symbolic, if you will, and it is not performative: the accused who declares his guilt does not thereby transform himself into the guilty party. And yet avowal is, I think, essential in this whole system. Neither performative nor symbolic, I would suggest instead, if changing the usual meaning slightly, that avowal is of the order of drama or dramaturgy. If one understands the \u201cdramatic\u201d not as a mere ornamental addition, but as every element in a scene that brings forth the foundation of legitimacy and the meaning of what is taking place, then I would say that avowal is part of the judicial and penal drama. It is an essential element of its dramaturgy, in the full sense of the term.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201c[W]e could say,\u201d Foucault concludes, \u201cthat avowal is one of the most intense elements of the judicial drama and one of the most necessary\u201d (WT<\/em>, 210). Precisely why may remain a mystery. We can nonetheless begin to appreciate why these questions might matter to Foucault, and so to us, by turning to some more recent instances of \u201cjudicial and penal drama.\u201d<\/p>\n

We may come back here to A View from the Bridge<\/em>. In the \u201cperiod around 1955,\u201d Foucault noted, \u201cthere was a kind of latent crisis, if you will\u2014something that we felt was falling apart\u201d (WT<\/em>, 241\u20132). While Foucault alluded most directly in this 1981 interview to challenges to psychiatry in France, his references to parallel developments in England summon a larger shift. Miller\u2019s play\u2014first performed in 1955\u2014also depicted a world on the brink of collapse, albeit a collapse centered here around the very personal tragedy of Eddie Carbone (a man not \u201cpurely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known\u201d as the lawyer-chorus figure notes) whose obsessive desire for his niece spirals out in the wider community. The story of his inarticulate desires and refusal to see where they may lead intersected with a larger drama, however, in which Eddie\u2019s status as both desiring and legal subject remain center stage. In van Hove\u2019s recent production, the piercing light of tragic destiny (what Foucault terms \u201cthe divine sight that cuts through time and is atemporal\u201d [WT<\/em> 68\u20139]) coincided with the harsh glare of the lightbox\u2014a minimalist set that one review<\/a> described as \u201cat once an amphitheater, a church and a giant microscope\u201d\u2014in which the characters, performing barefoot, appeared. This scrutiny particularly comes to bear during a pivotal later scene, in which Eddie, unleashing the drama that will hurtle the play to its conclusion, first kisses his teenage niece, before then hurriedly kissing her flamboyant male lover. Asked why, by the lawyer-chorus, he responds: \u201cTo show her what he is!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u201d\u2014and \u201cwho\u201d\u2014Eddie \u201cis\u201d remain the central questions here, both within the unfolding drama as well as its posthumous reckoning by the lawyer (whose concluding speech, describing Eddie as \u201cwholly known,\u201d laments that most of the \u201ctime now we settle for half\u201d but \u201cthe truth is holy\u201d\u2014in a twist on Foucault\u2019s observation about Oedipus Rex<\/em> that \u201cin opposition to the world of fate, atemporality, pure light, and the brilliance of the lightning that manifests the truth and guarantees destiny, the chorus asserts its right \u2026 to remain in the dark\u201d WT<\/em> 68). Rather than attempting to determine whether the play dramatizes repressed incestuous desire deflected onto homophobia, or vice versa<\/em>, the elemental recent staging\u2014which returned to Miller\u2019s original plans for a stripped-down production presented in a single act, so as to more closely resemble Greek drama\u2014instead called attention to the ways these questions take shape, dramatic shape at that, amidst colliding modes of truth. The \u201choly\u201d truth of destiny intersects here, albeit obliquely, with the law (which in turn intersects, albeit incoherently, with sexuality, completing the circle with Foucault\u2019s earlier reference to \u201cla pratique de l\u2019aveu<\/em>\u201d during his January lecture) [2]. We find more disquieting recent examples of the dynamics that concern Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling<\/em> in the eminently Foucauldian Netflix series Making a Murderer<\/a><\/em>, which documents in terrifying detail the ways a man with a reputation for sexual exhibitionism and a low-functioning teen are constructed as criminal subjects, with the orchestration of evidence working in synchrony with the emerging \u201ctruth\u201d of their criminality. Given Foucault\u2019s attention to the mutation of mandatory avowal into the disclosure of latent criminality, we may only read a recent proposal, however well-intentioned, that \u201c[n]o one should be convicted of a crime\u2014or even stopped by the police\u2014without evidence of a criminal state of mind\u201d with profound disquiet [3].<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/h1>\n

[1] For much of the twentieth century, after all, when queers were not facing treatment for mental disorders or classification as pathological, they were facing suspicion for crime. As Timothy Stewart-Winter has noted in a recent study, following the murder of three teenagers in Chicago in 1955, a \u201cpsychiatrist who worked frequently with the criminal courts \u2026 called on police to \u2018round up every known sex offender and moron,\u2019 further advising police that \u2018there are several Chicago areas where persons with abnormal sexual attitudes tend to congregate.\u2019\u201d See Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics <\/em>(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 30.<\/p>\n

[2] Disconnect nonetheless remains central here: this is aveu<\/em> from the bridge after all. As Christopher Bigsby notes, the advice Eddie gives to his wife and niece about keeping quiet concerning the Italian cousins that live illegally with them\u2014\u201cif you said it you knew it, if you didn\u2019t say it you didn\u2019t know it\u201d\u2014applies \u201cequally to himself. So long as his feelings never make their way into language he can deny them to others and to himself.\u201d Arthur Miller: A Critical Study<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Eddie is said to be suffering from \u201ca passion that had moved into his body like a stranger\u201d that the play makes the truth through which he is \u201cwholly known.\u201d<\/p>\n

[3] Gideon Yaffe, \u201cTo Convict, Prove a Guilty Mind,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, February 12, 2016, A27.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Owen Havard A View from the Bridge (1955) by Arthur Miller, recently treated to an elemental restaging by director Ivo van Hove, features a narrator\u2014whose role resembles that of a Greek chorus\u2014drawn from the Italian enclave of Brooklyn in… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38975],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-10-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}